Alex Vikoulov

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

"For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So, imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence." -Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, The Movie 2014)

Creating a digital mind, “artificial
consciousness” so to speak, from scratch, based on simulation of the human
brain’s functionality would be much easier than to create the whole brain
emulation of a living human. In the book “How
to Create a Mind: The Secret of the Human Thought Revealed” (2012) Ray
Kurzweil describes his theory of how our neocortex works as a self-organizing
hierarchical system of pattern recognizers that well may be our starting basis
for machine consciousness algorithms. The human brain and its interaction with
the environment may be simulated to approximate the functioning of the human
brain of an individual living in the pre-Singularity era. Simulation may be
satisfactory if it reflects our history based on enormous amount of digital or
digitized data accumulated since the 1950s to the present.

Friday, March 6, 2020

"Whether somebody is implemented on silicon or biological tissue, if it does not affect functionality or consciousness, is of no moral significance. Carbon chauvinism, in the form of anthropomorphism, speciesism, bioism or even fundamentalist humanism, is objectionable on the same grounds as racism." -Gregory L. Garrett

III. INTERLINKING: This dynamic, horizontal integration approach stipulates real-time optimization of AGIs in the context of globally distributed network. Add one final ingredient– be it computing power, speed, amount of shared/stored data, increased connectivity, the first mind upload or a critical mass of uploads, or another “spark of life”– and the global neural network, the Global Brain, may, one day in the not-so-distant future, “wake up” and become the first self-aware AI-powered system (Singleton?). Or, may the Global Brain be self-aware already, but on a different from us humans timescale? It becomes obvious and logically inevitable that we are in the process of merging with AI and becoming superintelligences ourselves by incrementally converting our biological brains into artificial superbrains and interlinking with AGIs in order to instantly share data, knowledge, and experience.

IMMORTALITY or OBLIVION? I hope that everyone would agree that there are only two possible outcomes after having created Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for us: immortality or oblivion. The necessity of the beneficial outcome of the upcoming intelligence explosion cannot be overestimated.

Any AGI at or above
human-level intelligence can be considered as such, I’d argue, only if she has
a wide variety of emotions, ability to achieve complex goals and motivation as an
integral part of her programming and personal evolution. I could identify the following three most
optimal ways to create friendly AI (benevolent AGI), in order to safely navigate uncharted waters of the forthcoming
intelligence explosion:

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

"Your life is a dream. It’s a dream of reality. When I woke up one morning, I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel 'oh-so-real' when inside them but they are what they are – dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true. This purposeful computational process is centered around one objective, one guiding principle only, one 'raison d’être' – to produce a meaningful experience in the context of 'embodied' mind."

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Data is integral to any business operation.
Companies constantly seek out new sources of competitive advantage based on
developments in data and technology in order to make accurate predictions and
intelligent decisions about where to invest their resources. Data analytics,
traditionally known as market research and internal analysis, is being used to
assess risks and identify growth opportunities and is becoming a valuable tool
to many organizations. In today’s business environment, it’s impossible to
operate without data, in fact, it now becomes a primary asset. The Economist has called it the new oil
that will ensure future prosperity.

​Reminiscent of such recent classics as Erik Davis’ TechGnosis (1998) and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Ouroboros Code should eventually find its way to the shelves of libraries owned by the fans of cybernetics, metaphysics and esoteric philosophies. What you might at first construe as a clear but flamboyant writing style, you should love by the end of the book. Let Antonin's poetic genius deliver to you some furiously complex concepts and abstract ideas so that you could enjoy this conceptual journey into the heart of digital alchemy, this coveted bridge between science and spirituality! At times over-technical in alternative style of narration – especially when discussing natural intelligence and A.I. – the philosopher will make you feel like you just downloaded some latest cognitive update onto your mindware. Neologisms such as Conscienergy and Pansentience, Webmind and Cosmosemiosis, digital Akasha and proto-time, add a definite charm to this chef-d’oeuvre of digital theosophy.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

"When we look through the other end of the telescope, however, we can see a different pattern. We can make out what I call the One Mind — not a subdivision of consciousness, but the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds, past, present, and future belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the single, one mind that each individual appears to possess." -Larry Dossey

Are we evolving into a new species with hybrid thinking, interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point may the Web become self-aware? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?